In 1597, Lodovico Arrivabene, Mantuan archpriest and literary light of the Gonzaga, published Europe’s first chivalric romance focused entirely on the exploits of Chinese and Asian knights. Since that time, Il Magno Vitei has remained mostly a footnote in Italian and world literary history. This essay offers, for the first time, a closer look at the content and literary,...

This essay deals with rules and attitudes towards the Spanish succession crisis from 1580 to the extinction of the Spanish Habsburg dynasty in 1700. It argues that apart from succession laws, which were set down in the legal texts of the many different realms under Habsburg authority, attitudes and expectations created implicit rules for the succession. These attitudes and expectations have...

Although Lienhard Jost is recognized as a leading member of the “Strasbourg prophets” and an important influence on the Anabaptist leader Melchior Hoffman, Jost’s prophecies have been thought to be entirely lost. A copy of Jost’s prophecies was preserved in Vienna, however, and this newly rediscovered book provides a new source for early Anabaptism in Strasbourg and enables a thorough revision...

A London divorce case from 1590 suggests that the early modern reception of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew would have been very mixed. With methods that paralleled those of Petruchio, Christopher Percy tried to “tame” his wife to force her to give up her estate and her jointure. While Petruchio tamed his shrew, Margery Percy, a remarried widow, resisted her husband’s efforts...

The appearance of arts of forgetting during the golden age of mnemotechnics offers a unique perspective on the interaction between history, memory, and forgetting at a time of paradigmatic change. This article explores this interaction through Cornelius Agrippa’s De incertitudine et vanitate artium et scientiarum, a declamation calling for a return to simple faith and understanding....